Over 25 years after Selena Quintanilla’s death, the new Netflix series, Selena: The Series will premiere on Dec. 4 with Christian Serratos as the iconic singer. Serratos is of Mexican and Italian descent, and is best known for her role as Rosita Espinosa in The Walking Dead. Her fellow cast will include Ricardo Chavira as Selena’s father Abraham, Seidy López as her mother Marcella, Noemí González as her sister Suzette, Gabriel Chavarria as her brother A.B., Jesse Posey as her husband Chris Perez and Madison Taylor Baez as Young Selena.
According to Harper’s BAZAAR, the biographical series will focus on Selena’s journey from her childhood in Texas during the 1980s to her rise to fame in the mid-1990s. Selena: The Series will be a two-part series, with the first part including six one-hour long episodes highlighting the challenges she and her family faced, and introducing her marriage with Chris Perez.
Netflix released a teaser trailer shot in black and white that shows a young Selena speaking with her father. In the trailer, Selena is performing her hit song, “Como La Flor” on stage while dialogue with her father plays in the background. Her father says, “Do you trust your father?” as she responds with “yes.” He then says, “If you keep practicing, pretty soon it’s all gonna pay off. Just watch.” The trailer ends with him looking back on Selena’s childhood saying, “When I see you on that stage, I still see the six-year-old girl singing in our backyard.”
Selena Quintanilla was born in Lake Jackson, Texas to Marcella Quintanilla who is of Cherokee ancestry and Abraham Quintanilla who is of Mexican descent. She began singing when she was 10 years old in her family’s band Selena y Los Dinos, which also included her brother A.B. and sister Suzette. Music producers often told her family that she would never be successful because she was a woman in a musical genre dominated by men.
Selena is known as the Queen of Tejano music with hit songs, like “Amor Prohibido” and “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.” In the 1990s, she became one of the best-selling Latin artists and she won a Grammy in 1994 for Best Mexican-American Album. In 1995, she was tragically murdered at the age of 23 at a motel in Corpus Christi by Yolanda Saldívar, her fanclub manager. She was on the verge of creating mainstream American pop music as her album, Dreaming of You was recorded a few weeks before her death. It was released in July 1995, becoming the first album by a Hispanic artist to debut at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart.
Jaime Dávila founded Campanario, the production company working with the Quintanilla family to bring Selena’s series to life. In 2014, he launched the company with his father Jaime Dávila Sr. with the purpose of having more Latinos represented in Hollywood. The show was created by Moisés Zamora, an award-winning Mexican-American filmmaker and writer. The Quintanilla family will serve as the executive producers of the show. The series will premiere 23 years after the critically acclaimed biopic Selena starring Jennifer Lopez was released. Up to this day, Selena is considered one of the most influential and iconic artists in all of Latin American music history.
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